Norman Finkelstein DESTROYS Identity Politics | A Warning to the Real Left

SIDEBAR
Born to a Jewish family in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, later a naturalised_German revolutionary, Luxemburg became involved in radical politics at an early age via the Proletariat party, and fled to Switzerland in 1889.  In 1897 she was awarded a Doctor of Law in political economy from the University of Zurich, becoming one of the first women in Europe to do so. In 1898, Luxemburg moved to Germany, and soon became a leading figure in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Her political activities included teaching Marxist economics at the party’s training school. Luxemburg was imprisoned several times, including in Germany and in Congress Poland during the 1905 Revolution.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the SPD [defying the call to have workers boycott the war ] supported the German war effort, after which Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the anti-war Spartacus League, which became affiliated with the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The pair were arrested in 1916 for their activities and imprisoned until the November Revolution of 1918, after which they co-founded the Communist Party of Germany. In January 1919, Luxemburg participated in the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, an attempted communist overthrow of the SPD-ruled Weimar Republic. The ill-prepared uprising (considered a blunder by Luxemburg herself)^[2] was crushed by the government, which cynically deployed anti-communist Freikorps paramilitaries to help with this sordid task. These fascists captured, tortured, and murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Luxemburg had argued against the reformist road to socialism advocated by Eduard Bernstein, defending the necessity of a socialist revolution. For all her courage and commitment, Rosa was nonetheless in some important respects what she often criticised, a “bourgeois ultraleftist”.  Indeed in later decades, due to her constant opposition to vanguardism (Leninism), and later Stalinism, while advocating a form of workers spontaneism, she might have been classified as a left-anti-commmunist.  Prominent anarchist communists and libertarian Marxists such as Rosa, Sylvia Pankhurst, and later, Emma Goldman were among the first left-wing critics of Bolshevism. 

SOURCES: Wikipedia